Snapshot: ‘Upside-Down Girl’ (1974), by Mark Cohen

The photo forms part of a collection of images that the photographer took in Wilkes-Barre, the blue-collar town in Pennsylvania, during the 1970s and 1980s

The photographer Mark Cohen has spent decades capturing images of life on the streets of Wilkes-Barre, the blue-collar town in Pennsylvania where he was born in 1943.

The image, “Upside-Down Girl”, forms part of a collection of photographs that Cohen took in Wilkes-Barre during the 1970s and 1980s. In many shots the subject is seen close-up but cropped and only partially visible – an estranging effect created in part by Cohen’s technique of holding the camera at arm’s length while using a wide-angle lens and taking the shots without using the viewfinder.

A new exhibition of Cohen’s work (see slideshow below), which is in the collections of museums around the world, has just opened at the Danziger Gallery in New York. “They are not easy pictures. But I guess that’s why they’re mine,” says the 70-year-old Cohen.